Peggy Noonan

On Halloween I had one of those days that veered from scene to scene. In the morning, in the waiting room of a Manhattan eye doctor’s office, I watched and listened as a young secretary who was dressed for the day in a Morticia costume—all in black, white powdered face, black eye makeup, black pointy witch’s hat placed on her desk, white spider-web hose on her legs—called patients and left messages like this: “Mrs. Smith, this is Dr Jones’ office. We referred you to New York Eye and Ear hospital recently, and so you will have to be tested for anthrax. Please call us.”

Near the end of the day I had a long talk with a beloved friend who told me that in her office at a great entertainment magazine in Manhattan the young people who are researchers and editorial assistants—they are called “the kids in the hall”—came in to work dressed for Halloween as characters from recent movies. One young man came in bare-chested, with meticulous tattoos running up and down his arms and across his chest; he had dyed his hair blonde and spiked it; he silently walked around the office taking Polaroids of whoever spoke to him and writing on the back what they’d said. He was, that is, the brain-damaged man Guy Pearce played in “Memento.” And he not only won the prize for best costume, he was applauded by everyone at Time Life.

The fabulous wittiness and spirited gaiety of New Yorkers at this time in history can take your breath away. As far as I’m concerned the guy who showed up as Guy Pearce is a national treasure. So are the people with the crazy/funny e-mails about Osama, and the young woman I saw on the street last night in the dark, waiting for a cab to go to a Halloween party. The woman she was with was a fairy princess in pink, with a wand. But the woman who made me laugh was dressed top to bottom in traditional Arab Muslim dress, covered top to bottom in black muslin, veil and all. She was waving her arms and making woo-woo sounds for fun. I just saw her and her friend and started to laugh, and they did too.

Wit and comedy are an expression of the life force, and of life-love. They are an attempt to summon joy. Their practitioners do us a great public service.

*   *   *

The friend who witnessed and applauded “Guy Pearce,” and who laughed about it with me like a happy kid, then veered with me to another part of what we’re all feeling here in old New York. It is not, as people say, posttraumatic stress disorder. It is postincident sadness, and there’s nothing disordered about it. This is what it’s like: The day is going by and everything’s fine and you’re humming along and doing what you’re doing. Then you see something—an image on the TV, someone reporting on the war—and all of a sudden in your head you see the first tower groaning to the ground, and the demonic debris cloud billowing like a natural force, chasing modernity down the street.

We’ll all get over it; we are getting over it; but we still get mugged by memories. When I visit Brooklyn someone always says, as we approach the bridge, “That’s where the towers were,” and I don’t look. I used to, but now I look at the river. I go to a high rise, looking for a sublet near my son’s school, and they said let’s go to the top, where the views are. Meaning: where the brilliant Manhattan skyline is, the dream view of all dream views. And I said, without thinking, “I don’t want a view.” There was silence for a moment. We heard the fax machine whir. Then someone said, “I think we have something on nine.”

I have postincident heartache. Everyone here does. But they also dress up like Guy Pearce, and they also cheer on the Yankees, and they unfurl banners at the House that Ruth Built that say “New York Is Back,” and last night they sang “New York, New York” along with the Frank Sinatra recording in the stadium when our team won. They sang loud and straight to the end of the song, even though they’re not sure New York is back. It takes a special kind of hardiness to sing like that when you’re not sure.

My people are a hardy people, and fabulously vulgar. This morning in the New York Post there was an item saying Ground Zero is the new hot spot for meeting guys. And a rental agent told me about a woman who called his office to say she’s been commuting downtown for years and, uh, like, who’s handling the apartments of all the dead people?

He was appalled. Me too. But I also thought: New Yorkers are survivors, and that isn’t all bad.

*   *   *

But this is about what’s next. I’m going to run long, so park this in your computer if you’re busy and come back later.

We continue as a nation on edge. People who live near nuclear reactors are afraid, ditto people in big cities, ditto people near postal depots and people in crop-duster America. That would make just about all of us. (Add now: the entire state of California.)

And we know—we have reluctantly perceived—that our stretched and stressed law enforcement and protection and security agencies are working overtime, creatively and against many odds, and still they know essentially nothing. They don’t know what will be hit next or how or by whom, they don’t know where the anthrax is from or who sent it. The best the government seems able to do is try hard, work hard, and tell a nervous populace to be a little more nervous. One hopes they know much more than they say; one doubts. (And they shouldn’t make us more nervous; they should make us more aware, which is not quite the same thing.)

Advice to the administration: Take, as your inspiration for your daily reporting of the situation, the image of George W. Bush on the pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium. He didn’t spin the ball; he threw it straight and down the middle. The competent catcher caught it.

This is what grownups do, and we have proved ourselves the past seven weeks to be a nation of grownups.

We know, for instance, that a nuclear reactor may be hit by the bad men. We wonder: Is every nuclear reactor in the country therefore now being protected by U.S. defense forces on the ground and jets overhead? They should be. And we should be told if it is happening.

A caveat, however. I watched Don Rumsfeld for an hour on TV yesterday. He holds a brisk and direct briefing. It probably took him an hour or so to prepare for it. In all, he probably gives at least three hours a day to one form of the press or another. This keeps our country informed to a degree, but I keep wondering: Could FDR and his cabinet have waged World War II successfully if they’d been spending half their time on the press? Could Lincoln have saved the Union after first Bull Run if he’d spent three hours a day talking to Horace Greeley?

One wonders if this couldn’t be more centralized, with one authoritative voice, and everyone else in the government doing what they have to do: find the bad men.

(I no longer say bad guys. Guy is too warm, too familiar, too colloquial for the evil ones. So: bad men.)

*   *   *

While the government discovers what is happening with anthrax and other threats, what must the public do?

I think we must repeat history. We must go back to the future. Our country was founded, cleared and hammered together by individuals who did it themselves and together—themselves as autonomous units making the decision to continue pushing west or settle down in eastern Ohio; and together with all the other people who made decisions like theirs. Together they did the house raisings and the barn raisings and started the church that started the first library in the wilderness. The federal government was not, in a daily and present and on the ground sense, of much help.

And that’s sort of where we are now.

It’s back to being pioneer women, hoe in hand; back to being ready to shoo the kids into the cellar beneath the floorboards if the war party comes. And pioneer men working the fields side by side, seeing to the horses and the wheels of the wagons.

So: pioneer women, and men.

Or, as I’ve said, Mrs. Miniver, our doughty, middle-class, middle-aged Englishwoman keeping the children’s dreams alive and chasing Nazis from the kitchen in blitz-torn England.

How exactly to be a Mrs. Miniver or a pioneer woman? You’d think all the hungry-for-ratings news shows would be doing this story, but they’re not. Maybe they think it would look like fear mongering. But it would be received, I think, as helpful. And of course it might help our nation and save lives.

*   *   *

First thing we must do is know this: We are, all of us and each of us, part of the new U.S. defense system. We are all soldiers now. We have been drafted by history. And we must be watchful and protective as soldiers. Second thing: It’s good to think locally. Third thing: Carry a camera. Cameras may turn out to be the first and best 21st-century homeland defense weapon.

But the point is: We’re all in this together and will have to work together, locally and nationally.

“The American people are a huge and sensitive early-warning system,” the defense expert Peter Black told me. “We are extraordinarily well-connected citizens.” I found Mr. Black on the Internet; he wrote a piece for Wired magazine eight years ago that warned of America’s vulnerability to various kinds of terrorism, especially of the electrical and infrastructure kind.

“You want to be aware of what potential terrorist targets are, and to do it we have to think visually,” Mr. Black says. Potential terror targets are “under the ground, over the ground and in the air.” Among them: natural gas pipes and distribution areas, local electrical grids, local telephone distribution systems, telephone switching stations, the local reservoir.

Appoint yourself a member of the Neighborhood Civilian Defense Patrol, the kind we used to have during World War II, and need again. (Memo to Tom Ridge: This is a good idea, bring it back.)

Find out what sensitive infrastructure you have locally, find out where it is, and keep your eye on it. Case the joint. Get a bunch of folks together to watch things. If you see anything funny—say, guys with box cutters who look like they could be Mideastern terrorists and who happen to be videotaping the main office of the local nuclear power plant—take out your weapon: your camera.

Snap a photo of the possible bad man. Snap a photo of his car, and his plates, and his confederates

Use a digital camera if you can (about $50, available in your basic electronics and camera stores). If you do it with a digital camera you won’t have to wait for the film to be developed, you can call 911 or the FBI, tell them what you saw, and tell them you can download pictures of it into your computer and shoot it to them right away. “The FBI is amassing a cross-referenced data base,” Mr. Black told me, and it holds real potential for finding the bad men.

Mr. Black makes a point that deserves making: While we were as a nation on an extended commercial lark the past 10 years, our obsession with getting our hands on the newest and latest and best new toy helped build an extraordinary array of items that now can be put to a more serious purpose.

*   *   *

So: keep your eye on the world outside and carry a camera. What else?

Half the people in New York now use this phrase: “my Israeli guy.” We all know someone from Israel who has lived a life a bit like the one we are entering.

“Do what we do in Israel. We have what we call a safe room.” This was my Israeli guy, an elderly fellow at my local hardware store, on Sept. 13. I told him I needed advice on how to make my son and myself safer at the margins as we entered a difficult unknowable time.

He told me what to do. I’ve checked it with people. it seems to be good advice for anyone caught in the middle of terror, and needing a place to gather and duck.

So: a safe room. Find the room with the thickest walls and fewest or smallest windows and doors in your house or apartment. Make do with what you have. If you live in a one-room studio apartment, that’s your safe room. If you have a secure room in the middle of the house, that’s your safe room. Basement with thick walls and little windows? Safe room. (If you live in a big apartment building, ask the owner/super/board head, Whatever happened to the old fallout shelters big buildings used to have? They still exist. They’re often the laundry room. Maybe the one in your building can be turned into a communal safe room.)

OK. You’ve figured out where your safe room is. What to have in it? You start with tape. My Israeli guy told me to buy two-inch-wide blue 3M Scotch tape, and tape any openings that allow air into the safe room. Tape the window frames, the door frames. I asked him if I could use gray gaffer’s tape as it seems sturdier and more . . . fume-stopping. He said: Sure. So I bought both. And two big rolls of blue and two big rolls of gray are in my safe room, along with heavy scissors, a utility knife and a box cutter.

Question: Um, if you tape everything shut and sit there with your kids and breathe, won’t you, um, run out of oxygen?

You probably won’t be there long enough.

If we are hit by a chemical attack, the chemicals will in time disperse into the air. If we are hit by a bio attack, you’ll stay there as long as you can and then get out. If it’s a dirty bomb with radioactive material, you get into the safe room soon as you can and stay there a few hours after the blast. And then you get out of Dodge.

A safe room isn’t a place to live but a place to duck the incoming.

Still, you want to have plenty of stuff in it in case you need it, and as the place where everyone in the family knows you keep it. Get big plastic containers of water—enough for everyone in your family for a few days to a week. (I think: Get too much. Too much bottled water may turn out to be a good thing, and in any case will likely get drunk along the way.)

Keep flashlights in the safe room, with backup batteries and backups to the backups. Have bandages and medicines—can’t hurt, might help. Whatever prescription medication you may be on, get a month’s supply and put it in the safe room. In California they call this making an earthquake pack: everything you need to get through a few days with systems going down.

For communications, you want a battery-operated radio, a ham radio if you have it. Two good ideas. Get a crankable radio in case your electricity goes down—you can get them off the shelf at consumer electronics stores. Those walkie-talkies that people started using the past few years (I think the most well known is made by Motorola) could be a great thing to have in a safe room or outside it. They have a radius of a mile or two, a lot of people use them, and you can find out a lot on their shared channels. Peter Black again: “They can be a short-term communications network if the lights go off for a while.”

A lot of us noted a few weeks ago that when the World Trade Center was hit, the phones in New York stopped working reliably—but the Internet stayed up. Why? Because it was, essentially, designed by our defense establishment to stay up. If you have wireless Internet access, a Blackberry or whatever, it goes into the safe room with you.

By the way: Keep making sure all battery-operated and electrical operated items are fully charged. Just keep making sure everything’s charged.

Have enough canned goods to last you and your family a week or so. Canned franks and beans are not delicious, but they can withstand any blow, and if you get nuked they’ll come out fully cooked. (Sorry—New York moment.)

Memo to our wonderful television networks: Do the safe-room segment. Do a piece on how to get through a rough few days if a rough few days happen in your town.

“PrimeTime Live,” “20/20,” “60 Minutes,” “Dateline,” “Oprah,” “The View”: This means you. As you are all in the entertainment/information business, make it not only helpful but fun. Do interviews with Israelis and get safe-room stories—they’ve used them. Oprah, go to Martha Stewart, a hardy and quick-thinking woman who hasn’t constructed her career by being careless, and ask her what she has in her safe room. This might be helpful and will surely be amusing. (Frank Rich will make fun of it. So what? In the making fun of it he’ll spread the word.)

*   *   *

I am told it would be wise to take some money out of the bank and keep it in a safe place. The bad men may and many think will attempt to destabilize and disrupt our financial and banking institutions and systems through cyber warfare, etc. Everyone tells me to get $ 1,000 or more, a mix of small and large bills but more small than large. Also have change. “Have silver,” another Israeli told me, “it can come in handy—phones, and things.”

Keep your wallet, cards, keys, license and a good bit of cash near each other, always, in a regular place so you know where to find them quickly if you need them. Take them into the safe room and out of the safe room with you.

*   *   *

I suspect we should be making sure the barbecue grill in the garage has a lot of charcoal and a lot of lighter fluid. If you can, have a lot of frozen food in the freezer; if you lose electricity, the food will last longer if there’s a lot and not a little. And if it turns out you have to cook a lot of it on a peaceful day, you can invite the neighbors.

I suspect we should all be getting together with our neighbors and friends and family and attempting to plan or coordinate what might be called . . . The Escape. Or: The Fleeing. If something bad happens, where do you all meet? If mom and dad are at work and the three kids are at three different schools, who picks who up and meets who where? Make out a phone contact list, with everyone’s home and office and cell numbers; an e-mail contact list too. Have copies made, laminate them, and give to family and friends.

Have an escape plan. If you had to flee, how would you do it? Think about it. Think about people in the neighborhood.

It’s a good idea for the most vulnerable—the old who live alone, single people, single mothers with kids, or those who live with people who are not fully functioning—to be looked out for by neighbors, or groups, or organizations. Local churches and police could keep a drop-by list for the most vulnerable.

Another idea, again from Peter Black: Why not approach your local doctor and ask him if he would stock up on all needed medicines, and the neighborhood will pay him now, in advance to get them and organize it all. Raise the money at a cake sale, get him what he needs; he’ll help you on a terrible day.

*   *   *

A friend who would know tells me, “You need a dozen gas masks.” I said, “Oh no, it’s just me and my son.” He said, “No! The most embarrassing thing that can happen is you’re having friends over and you’re attacked. You and your son get your gas masks and put them on and say, ‘We are safe, I am sorry you are not.’ Terrible! You have to have gas masks for your guests!”

Well I guess you do, and I’ll save up. (The unpopular have a real advantage here, and should take some deserved satisfaction.) Like everyone else in New York, I have the kind of gas mask you get at the local hardware store. I have tried to get a better one. I still have no idea if this is a good idea, as smarter people than I are disagreeing on it. But I mean to get one if I can.

The subject of guns has come up. Everyone has an opinion. Here’s mine: If you know how to use a gun, and you can get it legally, get a gun. If you want to learn how to use it, go to the NRA, and they’ll tell you what ranges and instructors are available.

Learn really well how to use it, store it; handle it, hide it. The number of people registering for gun ownership is skyrocketing, and understandably. Worst case scenario: A “dirty bomb”—a big hunking so-called suitcase bomb with radioactive material—goes off in the middle of your city. Everyone ducks and covers; those close to the blast die. Chaos ensues. You’re in the safe room trying to figure out when to leave, but you can’t find out on the short-wave and the battery-operated radio isn’t working. Some people go out, though—vandals, criminals, the marginally sane, and they gather together and become an ambulatory little miniriot. The various branches of government move and bungle, help and make mistakes. You are at the mercy of luck, chance, geography. You are threatened. This is where you and your neighbors with guns come in.

The present crisis is a great blow to the antigun forces, and they know it. That’s why they have nothing to say right now. It is a boost for the right to bear arms, for everyone knows they well may be needed, not now but longer down the rocky road.

But it won’t help if you don’t know how to use a gun, or are afraid to use it, or brandish it ineffectually. After you scare the bad rioter and then show you’re incompetent he will be very, very angry with you, and perhaps “act out his anger,” as we say at school meetings.

*   *   *

So, do what you can. Think. We’re at war; think like a warrior and a survivor. This is not only a good idea, it will make you feel better, or at least a little bit safer, which is not a bad way to feel.

Then when you’re done planning, get dressed and go out to dinner, and have a nice time.

But remember as you get organized not to let your kids know, “This is what we’re doing because we’re scared.” It’s, “This is what I’m doing to make sure we’re safe.”

This is just a first pass at what to do now. I’ll be returning to it, and I ask you all to write in with your ideas. Because we’re all in it together.

I found the words on a yellow Post-It I’d stuck on the side of the bookcase in my office about a year ago. It had gotten covered up by phone numbers and pictures and doctor’s appointment cards, and yesterday, looking for a number, I found it—a piece of yellow paper with the words “His delicious mansard-roofed world.” It took me aback. And I remembered what it was.

That night I had been out with friends—it was last fall—and it was fun, and I got home thinking, simply, of something we all should think of more and I don’t think of enough: how wonderful it is to be alive, the joy of it, the beauty. And as I thought it—this is the part I remember most sharply—a scene came into my mind of a little French town with cobblestone streets and sharply slanting roofs on 18th-century buildings. Which made me think, in turn, in a blink, of New York, and its older architecture uptown and off the park, the old mansions off Fifth Avenue with sloping mansard roofs, and how this is the world we live in.

And I thought at that moment, with those pictures in my head: “His delicious, mansard-roofed world.” He being God. I wrote down the words on a Post-It and put it on the bookcase, thinking some day I’d use them in writing about . . . something. Maybe joy. Maybe: us. Or maybe I’d just see them and think: That was a nice moment.

Anyway, the words captured for me a moment of thought.

And last night I found them and thought: Oh—they speak of a moment in time.

*   *   *

Yesterday afternoon, I was with a teenage friend, taking a cab down Park Avenue. It was a brilliant day, clear and sparkling, and as the cab turned left at 86th Street the sun hit the windows in one of those flashes of bright gold-yellow that can, on certain days or at certain times, pierce your heart. We had been quiet, not talking, on the way to see a friend, when I said, “Do you . . . find yourself thinking at all of the ways in which you might be feeling differently about the future if September 11th had never happened?”

“Oh yes,” she said, softly. “Every day.”

And she meant it. And neither of us said any more and neither of us had to.

*   *   *

There are a lot of quiet moments going on. Have you noticed? A lot of quiet transformations, a lot of quiet action and quiet conversations. People are realigning themselves. I know people who are undergoing religious conversions, and changes of faith. And people who are holding on in a new way, with a harder grip, to what they already have and believe in.

Some people have quietly come to terms with the most soul-chilling thoughts. A young man I know said to me last week, as we chatted in passing on the street, “I have been thinking about the end of the American empire.” And I thought: Oh my boy, do you know the import, the weight, of the words you are saying? And then I thought Yes, he does. He’s been thinking, quietly.

Some people are quietly defining and redefining things. I am one of them. We are trying to define or paint or explain what the old world was, and what the new world is, and how the break between them—the exact spot where the stick broke, cracked, splintered—could possibly have been an hour in early September.

*   *   *

One thing that passes through our minds is what to call the Old World—“The Lost World,” or “The Golden Age,” or “Then.” We don’t have to know yet what to call the New World, and cannot anyway because it hasn’t fully revealed itself, and so cannot be named.

But if we can name the Old World, we’ll at least know exactly what it is we think we’ve lost. And this is a funny little problem, because if you go out onto your street right now, if you live anyplace but downtown Manhattan or Arlington, Va., the world outside looks exactly—exactly—like the one that existed a year ago. The pumpkins in the stores, the merry kids, the guy who owns the butcher shop outside smoking in his apron. Everything looks the same. Same people, same stores, same houses.

And yet we all feel everything has changed. And we’re right.

People say things like, “We have lost a sense of certainty,” and I nod, for it is true. But on the other hand, I didn’t feel so certain about the future last year. Did you?

People say we have lost the assumption that what we had would continue. Or, this being America, get better.

Certainly people who were carefree have lost their carefreeness. And with no irony I think: That’s a shame. Carefreeness is good.

*   *   *

Lately when I think of the Old World I think of an insult that I mean as a tribute. It is the phrase the narcissism of small differences. In the world that has just passed, careless people—not carefree, careless—spent their time deconstructing the reality of the text, as opposed to reading the book. You could do that then. The world seemed so peaceful that you could actively look for new things to argue about just to keep things lively. You could be on a faculty and argue over where Jane Austen meant to put the comma, or how her landholding father’s contextually objective assumptions regarding colonialism impacted her work. You could have real arguments about stupid things. Those were the days! It’s great when life is so nice you have to invent arguments.

But the big thing I remember as we approached the end of the Old World, the thing I had been thinking for years and marveled over and also felt mildly anxious about, was this: You could go out and order and eat anything in a restaurant. And I had a sense that this wouldn’t last forever, and some day we’d look back on these days fondly.

I would actually think that. It actually seemed to me marvelous that we could order anything we wanted. Raspberries in February! Bookstores, shoe stores, computer stores, food stores. We could order anything. Www-dot-gimme-dot-com.

I think the general feeling was a lovely optimism, which was captured in a great ‘80s phrase: “The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.”

This was the thing: abundance. Not only of food but of potential, of hope, of the kid from the project’s dream of being the next J. Lo, or West Point cadet, or millionaire. Every middle-class kid in the suburbs thought it absolutely within his grasp to be the next Steven Spielberg or Russell Crowe, or to play Martin Sheen’s assistant on “The West Wing,” or run the record industry or direct commercials.

Abundant dreams. There was peace—crime down for the first time in a generation, the world relatively quiet, and in the suburbs they were starting to sleep with the windows open again! And material goods, things from the factory and the farm. As Kevin Spacey says in the commercial for his new movie, “Your produce alone has been worth the trip!”

God, it was the age of abundance.

Or maybe just: The Abundance.

*   *   *

I know people who are feeling a sense of betrayal at the big change, as if they thought history were a waiter in a crisp white jacket, and though they ordered two more of the same, instead—instead!—he brought them, on a pretty silver platter, something quite dreadful.

They feel betrayed because they thought what we have been living through the past four decades or so was “life.” But it wasn’t, it was “Superlife.”

In the long ribbon of history life has been one long stained and tangled mess, full of famine, horror, war and disease. We must have thought we had it better because man had improved. But man doesn’t really “improve,” does he? Man is man. Human nature is human nature; the impulse to destroy coexists with the desire to build and create and make better. They’ve both been with us since the beginning. Man hasn’t improved, the weapons have improved.

In the early 20th century the future was so bright they had to invent shades. They had everything—peace, prosperity, medical and scientific breakthroughs, political progress, fashion, glamour, harmless tasty scandals. The Gilded Age. And then all of a sudden they were hit by the most terrible war in all of European history, the most terrible plague in all of modern history (the Spanish flu) and on top of it all the most terrible political revolution in the history of man. And that was just the first 18 years.

*   *   *

People always think good news will continue. I guess it’s in our nature to think that whatever is around us while we’re here is what will continue until we’re not.

And then things change, and you’re surprised. I guess surprise is in our nature too. And then after the surprise we burrow down into ourselves and pull out what we need to survive, and go on, and endure.

But there’s something else, and I am thinking of it.

I knew for many years a handsome and intelligent woman of middle years who had everything anyone could dream of—home, children, good marriage, career, wealth. She was secure. And she and her husband had actually gotten these good things steadily, over 25 years of effort, and in that time they had suffered no serious reverses or illnesses, no tragedies or bankruptcies or dark stars. Each year was better than the previous.

It was wonderful to see. But as I came to know her I realized that she didn’t think she had what she had because she was lucky, or blessed. She thought she had them because she was better. She had lived a responsible, effortful life; of course it had come together. She had what she had because she was good, and prudent.

She deserved it. She was better than the messy people down the block.

She forgot she was lucky and blessed!

You forget you’re lucky when your luck is so consistent that it confounds the very idea of luck. You begin to think your good fortune couldn’t be luck, it must have been . . . talent. Or effort. Or superiority.

The consistency of America’s luck may have fooled many of us into forgetting we were all lucky to be born here, lucky to be living now, lucky to have hospitals and operas and a film industry and a good electrical system. We were born into it. We were lucky. We were blessed.

We thought we were the heirs of John Adams, Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk, Mr. Levitt of Levittown. And we are. But still, every generation ya gotta earn it. It doesn’t mean you’re better; it means you’re lucky, and ya gotta earn it.

*   *   *

How did our luck turn bad, our blessings thin out?

Great books will be written about that. But maybe from this point on we should acknowledge what we quietly know inside: It was a catastrophic systems failure, a catastrophic top-to-bottom failure of the systems on which we rely for safety and peace.

Another way to say it: The people of the West were, the past 10 years or so, on an extended pleasure cruise, sailing blithely on smooth waters—but through an iceberg field. We thought those in charge of the ship, commanding it and steering it and seeing to its supplies, would—could—handle any problems. We paid our fare (that is, our taxes) and assumed the crew would keep us safe.

We thought our luck would hold, too.

The people—us, you and me, the sensuous man on the deck—spent a lot of time strolling along wondering, What shall I pursue today, gold or romance? Romance or gold? I shall ponder this over a good merlot. We were not serious. We were not morally serious. We were not dark. We banished darkness.

The American people knew, or at least those paying attention knew, that something terrible might happen. But they knew the government had probably done what governments do to protect us. The people did not demand this; the government did not do it. Bad men were allowed in; bad men flourished here, fit right in, planned their deeds. They brought more bad men in after them. They are here among us now; they send anthrax through the mail and watch our reaction, predicating their next move perhaps upon our response.

Our intelligence system failed—but then for a quarter century we had been denying it resources, destroying its authority, dismantling its mystique. Our immigration system failed—but then in many ways it had been encouraged to fail. Our legal system failed.

One of our greatest institutions, American journalism, failed. When the editors and publishers of our great magazines and networks want you to worry about something—child safety seats, the impact of air bags, drunken driving, insecticides on apples—they know how to make you worry. They know exactly how to capture your attention. Mathew Shepard and hate crimes, Rodney King and racism: The networks and great newspapers know how to hit Drive and go from zero to the American Consciousness in 60 seconds. And the networks can do it on free airwaves, a gift from our government.

Did the networks and great newspapers make us worry about what we know we should have worried about? No. Did they bang the drums? No. Did they hit this story like they know how to hit a story? No.

In January 2001 the Homeland Security report, which declared flatly that international terrorism would inevitably draw blood on American soil, was unveiled. They called a news conference in a huge Senate office building. Congressmen came, and a senator, Pat Roberts of Kansas. Only a half dozen reporters showed up, and one, from the greatest newspaper in the nation, walked out halfway through. It was boring.

Every magazine and newspaper had, over the past 10 years, a front-page story and a cover on the madmen in the world and the weapons they could seize and get and fashion. But they never beat the drum, never insisted that this become a cause.

Why? In part I think for the same reason our political figures didn’t do anything. It would have been bad for ratings. The people don’t want serious things at 10 o’clock on a Tuesday night, they want Sela Ward falling in love. I will never, ever forget the important Democrat who told me over lunch why Bill Clinton (president of the United States, January 1993 through January 2001) had never moved and would never move in a serious way to deal with the potential of nuclear and biological terrorism. Because it doesn’t show up in the polls, he said. Because it doesn’t show up in the focus groups.

*   *   *

It was a catastrophic systems failure, top to bottom. And we all share in it, some more than others.

Except.

Except those who did the remarkable things that day, Sept. 11, 2001—the firemen who charged like the Light Brigade, the businessmen who said, “Let’s roll.” Which is, in part, why we keep talking about them. To remind ourselves who we are in the midst of the systems failure. They did the right thing just by being what they were, which gave us inspiration just when we needed it most.

And now we have to turn it all around.

Great books, as I said, will be written about these days, and the war on which we are embarked, on how it began and why America slept, and what America did when it awoke. Much awaits to be learned and told.

And what we must do now, in our anger and defensiveness, is support, assist and constructively criticize the systems that so catastrophically failed. For those systems still reign and we still need them. And they are trying to function now, and trying to protect us, with the same sense of loss we all share and the added burden of a mind-bending sense of remorse, frustration, anger and pain.

*   *   *

Where are we right now? We have reached the point in the story where the original trauma is wearing off (except in our dreams, where it’s newly inflicted), where expressions of solidarity and patriotism are true but tired, and questions about exactly how well our institutions are handling this—not in the past but right now—are rising.

It all began 45 days ago. We know who did the bombings because they were on the planes, and they left receipts.

But we do not know who their confederates here were, do not know who is spreading the anthrax that has hit Florida, New York and Washington, do not know the dimensions of the threat at home.

Authority figures are doubted. The letter carriers don’t trust their superiors to take care of them, and how they feel is legitimate and understandable. The workers in the newsrooms, reassured by the boss that if they were going to get anthrax they would have had it by now, do not trust what they’re being told, or the tellers. And that is legitimate and understandable.

We are reading anxious reports. Yesterday I read that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had admitted it kept nuclear plant vulnerability studies out and about and available for any citizen to see in their libraries. (Q: What were they thinking? A: They weren’t thinking; they were feeling, and what they were feeling was lucky.)

More and more one senses we’re going to have to be taking as much responsibility for ourselves—and on ourselves—as we can. Doing our own research, taking our own actions, making our own decisions, and acting on our own guts.

A week after Sept. 11 I was on a TV show where I said I’d been thinking about “Mrs. Miniver,” the 1942 movie with Greer Garson as the doughty British matron who saw her family—and thus her country—through the Blitz. I said that we were all going to have to be Mrs. Minivers now; we’re going to have to keep the home front going.

I keep waiting for some talk show or news show to do the Mrs. Miniver segment, telling us what to do in case of real and terrible trouble.

And no one is doing it.

So we must all be doing it ourselves. I am researching and talking to experts. Next week I will talk about “How to Be Mr. and Mrs. Miniver”—from how much water to buy to where to put it and how to get everyone in your ambit together. I will share everything I’m told and hear. And let me tell you why I think, in all this mess, we must gather together and talk about how to get through it together, as citizens. Because our systems are not fully working yet.

It’s a murky time. We’re all feeling a little bit lonely, and all of us at one moment or another have the existential willies. Those who have 13 kids and 34 grandchildren are feeling as alone as those who are actually all alone.

We’d all best handle as much as we can ourselves, in and with our own little units.

It may become a terrifically tough time. But we are not alone, as you well know. God loves faith and effort, and he loves love. He will help us get through this, and to enjoy Paris and New York again, and to breathe deep of his delicious, mansard-roofed world.

Amen.

It was Sept. 14 at 9 p.m., and I was on Fifth Avenue, directly across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I was standing, that is, directly in front of the statue of Atlas holding up the world, at the entrance of Rockefeller Center. I was with my 14-year-old son. We were waiting for friends who were going to accompany us downtown to see the memorials that had sprung up in Washington Square and other places.

Our friends were a few minutes late. We waited together on the quiet, near-empty street. New York had been attacked only days before, and our city was quiet; people were home.

Suddenly to our right, on the sidewalk, we saw two “Mideastern looking men,” as we all now say. They were 25 or 30 years old, dressed in jeans and windbreakers, and they were doing something odd. They were standing together silently videotaping the outside of St. Pat’s, top to bottom. We watched them, trying to put what we were seeing together. Tourists? It was a funny time of day for tourists to be videotaping a landmark—especially when the tourists looked like the guys who’d just a few days before blown up a landmark.

We watched them. After a minute or so they finished taping St. Pat’s and turned toward where we were. We were about 20 feet away from them, and we eyeballed them hard. They stared back at us in what I thought an aggressive manner: a deadeye stare, cold, no nod, no upturned-chin hello.

They stared at us staring at them for a few seconds, and then they began to videotape Rockefeller Center. We continued watching, and I surveyed the street for a policeman or patrol car. I looked over at the men again. They were watching me. The one with the camera puts it down for a moment. We stared, they stared. And then they left. They walked away and disappeared down a side street.

Let me tell you what I thought. I thought: Those guys are terrorists.

And then I thought: Whoa, wait a minute. I must be experiencing what people experienced after Pearl Harbor, when all of a sudden they’d see a young Asian guy with a camera and get all excited. You can get paranoid. You can get unfair.

I thought: The guys I just saw weren’t breaking the law, in any case there are no cops around, and if I drop a dime to overburdened 911—“I saw two Mideastern men taking pictures!”—they’d brush me off.

So I just filed it away, as did my son.

But neither of us could shake it.

*   *   *

Ten days later I am to be a guest on the Oprah show, where we are going to talk about the events of Sept. 11. A car picks me up in the early afternoon at my apartment to take me to a studio in midtown where I’ll talk to Oprah in Chicago. As we drive south down Park Avenue, the driver chats with me, and he seems jumpy. “You bothered like everyone else at what’s going on?” I ask.

He says—I paraphrase—“Yeah, I am. I been feeling funny since a thing I saw the other day. I’m standing with a bunch of limos and drivers, we’re waiting outside that big building, 520 Madison. And suddenly—we’re all hanging around talking—and suddenly we see these two guys, Mideastern guys, in turbans. And they’re videotaping 520 Madison Avenue top to bottom. Right in front of us. So we look at them and they look back—and then they keep doing it! So one of our guys starts to walk toward them, and the guys with the camera got outta there quick. And I’m telling you, it gave me the creeps!”

I get to the Oprah studio, do the show, get home, call the FBI tip line. I tell them my name, what I do for a living, say I’m going to tell them something that sounds small but may be big. The FBI tip line guy is polite, takes notes, thanks me. He asks me to get the limo driver’s name, I call around, get the number of his car company. The tip line guy calls me back, takes the number, thanks me again.

I say, “You guys must be getting 1,500 tips an hour.” He says yes, but they’re all appreciated and if I see any more Mideastern looking men videotaping I should call.

I figured: They’re busy taking other, more urgent tips, this isn’t going anywhere.

Then I remembered an FBI agent I’d met in the neighborhood, tried to reach her, couldn’t get her at her office or home. I leave messages, hear nothing, figure she’s out chasing the bad guys.

Now jump to this past week. Two things happen. My son is surfing Internet chat rooms last Sunday and goes to a conservative site, where he sees an interesting thing. A man or woman has written in to say—again I paraphrase—“The oddest thing happened at work the other day. I work at a petrochemical company, and these two Mideastern looking guys come in and say they want to videotape the inside of the plant for a college course they’re taking. They were approached and asked for identification by the manager. They became surly, angry, and left. Later the manager phoned the school they claimed to be students at—and they weren’t even registered!”

My son calls to me, we read it and look at each other. I decided to call the FBI again.

But the next morning my phone rings and it is the FBI, and it seems to be a real agent, not a telephone answerer. My initial tip line report has, apparently, trickled up into the “check it out” category. Or maybe they’ve gotten enough reports like mine that a discernable pattern has emerged. At any rate, the agent asked me to go through my story and the driver’s story, and then I threw in the report on the Internet, and he gave me his name and number and asked me to call if I saw anything else.

*   *   *

All this, of course, has me thinking. Maybe it has you thinking, too. I will share some of my thoughts. They are not original or unusual, but I feel they should maybe be said.

Again, they are only thoughts and hunches.

I think there are a lot of “sleeper cells”—not a few, as we all hope, but a lot. I think some of them are in Queens and Brooklyn and Manhattan, and in Jersey City and elsewhere in New Jersey . Boston, too. Maybe some are in the capital or Virginia or Maryland. Maybe some of those who delivered anthrax to the U.S. Capitol took a taxi. Maybe on the other hand they took the shuttle from LaGuardia. Certainly we know some cell or cells are in Florida.

I think some cell members may not be sure what their next move is. They’re not sure of their next assignment. They haven’t been told, or they haven’t, perhaps, chosen. I think cell members have been going around taking home movies of potential targets. I suspect they’ve been downloading them into computers and shooting them off to Osama and his lieutenants in the caves. I suspect they’ve been building a video library of places they might hit over the next few months and years and decade. And I think once they take one of the targets down they’ll happily return to the scene of the crime, take a nice tourist-type videotape of the crater they made—they’ll tell the cops they want to record the brave rescue workers—and send it triumphantly home.

That’s all based on nothing but hunches.

But there are things we know. As individuals, these men—for they are men, between roughly 17 and 45, which is to say they track in terms of sex and age group American criminals in American jails—are not only “hate filled” and “evil,” though they are these things. They are also, obviously, emotionally and intellectually primitive. Their minds, if quick and highly focused, are also limited, stunted. And their young-man’s arrogance is both a strength and their potential undoing. (Young male criminals of whatever sort tend to showy arrogance, and it is often their undoing.)

And I think as we attempt to find the bad guys in Afghanistan and elsewhere, we should all be thinking a little more, as citizens, about the search going on here, in America.

The people who are trying to kill us with bombs and biological weapons are not from Canada, Chile, China, India, Ireland, Tanzania, Congo, New Zealand or the island of Jamaica.

They are from the Arab Mideast. They are not Israeli.

They are men, and not women.

They are young men. That is, they are not old men, and they are not children.

So: We know the profile of the bad guys.

I think I saw some of them that night across from St. Pat’s, and I continue to regret not confronting them, questioning them and, if I had to, tackling them and screaming for help. I could have gotten us all arrested. If they had been innocent tourists I would have apologized, begged their forgiveness and offered to buy them a very nice dinner. If they had not been innocent, I would have helped stop some bad guys.

In the past month I have evolved from polite tip-line caller to watchful potential warrior. And I gather that is going on with pretty much everyone else, and I’m glad of it. I was relieved at the story of the plane passengers a few weeks ago who refused to board if some Mideastern looking guys were allowed to board. I was encouraged just last night when an esteemed journalist told me of a story she’d been told: Two Mideastern-looking gentlemen, seated together on a plane, were eyeballed by a U.S. air marshal who was aboard. The air marshal told the men they were not going to sit together on this flight. They protested. The marshal said, move or you’re not on this flight. They moved. Plane took off.

Good news: Everything went safely and calmly. Bad news: The two men were probably Ph.D.’s from Yale on their way to a bioethics convention. They made it clear they resented being split up, and I understand their resentment, and would feel real sympathy if they told me about it. You would, too.

But you know what? I think we’re in the fight of our lives, and I think we’re going to need their patience. And I think those who have not yet developed patience are going to have to grow up and get some.

*   *   *

No one likes “racial profiling,” “ethnic profiling,” “religious profiling.” But I see it this way: If groups of terrorists took out two huge buildings and part of the Pentagon and killed 5,000 people and then decided to unleash anthrax and it emerged that those terrorists were all middle-aged American blond women who tend to dress in blue jeans and T-shirts and like to go by Catholic churches and light candles, I would be deeply upset not only because the terrorists had done what they’d done. I would also be upset because they were just like me! I fit their profile! I look like them! I act like them! Everywhere I went people would notice me and give me hard looks and watch what I was doing. I would feel terrible about this. But you know what else I’d do? I’d suck it up. I’d understand. I wouldn’t like it, but I’d get it, and I’d accept it.

Because under very special circumstances—and these are special circumstances—you sometimes have to sacrifice. You have to drop your burly pride a little and try to understand and be accepting and accommodating and generous-spirited.

I think we’re going to require a lot of patience from a lot of innocent people. And you know, I don’t think that’s asking too much. And when it’s not given, I think we should recognize that as odd. About as odd as videotaping a great cathedral in the dark.

A few weeks ago I wrote a column called “God Is Back,” about how, within a day of the events of Sept. 11, my city was awash in religious imagery—prayer cards, statues of saints. It all culminated, in a way, in the discovery of the steel-girder cross that emerged last week from the wreckage—unbent, unbroken, unmelted, perfectly proportioned and duly blessed by a Catholic friar on the request of the rescue workers, who seemed to see meaning in the cross’s existence. So do I.

My son, a teenager, finds this hilarious, as does one of my best friends. They have teased me, to my delight, but I have told them, “Boys, this whole story is about good and evil, about the clash of good and evil.” If you are of a certain cast of mind, it is of course meaningful that the face of the Evil One seemed to emerge with a roar from the furnace that was Tower One. You have seen the Associated Press photo, and the photos that followed: the evil face roared out of the building with an ugly howl—and then in a snap of the fingers it lost form and force and disappeared. If you are of a certain cast of mind it is of course meaningful that the cross, which to those of its faith is imperishable, did not disappear. It was not crushed by the millions of tons of concrete that crashed down upon it, did not melt in the furnace. It rose from the rubble, still there, intact.

For the ignorant, the superstitious and me (and maybe you), the face of the Evil One was revealed, and died; for the ignorant, the superstitious and me (and maybe you), the cross survived. This is how God speaks to us. He is saying, “I am.” He is saying, “I am here.” He is saying, “And the force of all the evil of all the world will not bury me.”

I believe this quite literally. But then I am experiencing Sept. 11 not as a political event but as a spiritual event.

And, of course, a cultural one, which gets me to my topic.

It is not only that God is back, but that men are back. A certain style of manliness is once again being honored and celebrated in our country since Sept. 11. You might say it suddenly emerged from the rubble of the past quarter century, and emerged when a certain kind of man came forth to get our great country out of the fix it was in.

I am speaking of masculine men, men who push things and pull things and haul things and build things, men who charge up the stairs in a hundred pounds of gear and tell everyone else where to go to be safe. Men who are welders, who do construction, men who are cops and firemen. They are all of them, one way or another, the men who put the fire out, the men who are digging the rubble out, and the men who will build whatever takes its place.

And their style is back in style. We are experiencing a new respect for their old-fashioned masculinity, a new respect for physical courage, for strength and for the willingness to use both for the good of others.

You didn’t have to be a fireman to be one of the manly men of Sept. 11. Those businessmen on flight 93, which was supposed to hit Washington, the businessmen who didn’t live by their hands or their backs but who found out what was happening to their country, said goodbye to the people they loved, snapped the cell phone shut and said, “Let’s roll.” Those were tough men, the ones who forced that plane down in Pennsylvania. They were tough, brave guys.

*   *   *

Let me tell you when I first realized what I’m saying. On Friday, Sept. 14, I went with friends down to the staging area on the West Side Highway where all the trucks filled with guys coming off a 12-hour shift at ground zero would pass by. They were tough, rough men, the grunts of the city—construction workers and electrical workers and cops and emergency medical worker and firemen.

I joined a group that was just standing there as the truck convoys went by. And all we did was cheer. We all wanted to do some kind of volunteer work but there was nothing left to do, so we stood and cheered those who were doing. The trucks would go by and we’d cheer and wave and shout “God bless you!” and “We love you!” We waved flags and signs, clapped and threw kisses, and we meant it: We loved these men. And as the workers would go by—they would wave to us from their trucks and buses, and smile and nod—I realized that a lot of them were men who hadn’t been applauded since the day they danced to their song with their bride at the wedding.

And suddenly I looked around me at all of us who were cheering. And saw who we were. Investment bankers! Orthodontists! Magazine editors! In my group, a lawyer, a columnist and a writer. We had been the kings and queens of the city, respected professional in a city that respects its professional class. And this night we were nobody. We were so useless, all we could do was applaud the somebodies, the workers who, unlike us, had not been applauded much in their lives.

And now they were saving our city.

I turned to my friend and said, “I have seen the grunts of New York become kings and queens of the City.” I was so moved and, oddly I guess, grateful. Because they’d always been the people who ran the place, who kept it going, they’d just never been given their due. But now—“And the last shall be first”—we were making up for it.

*   *   *

It may seem that I am really talking about class—the professional classes have a new appreciation for the working class men of Lodi, N.J., or Astoria, Queens. But what I’m attempting to talk about is actual manliness, which often seems tied up with class issues, as they say, but isn’t always by any means the same thing.

Here’s what I’m trying to say: Once about 10 years ago there was a story—you might have read it in your local tabloid, or a supermarket tabloid like the National Enquirer—about an American man and woman who were on their honeymoon in Australia or New Zealand. They were swimming in the ocean, the water chest-high. From nowhere came a shark. The shark went straight for the woman, opened its jaws. Do you know what the man did? He punched the shark in the head. He punched it and punched it again. He did not do brilliant commentary on the shark, he did not share his sensitive feelings about the shark, he did not make wry observations about the shark, he punched the shark in the head. So the shark let go of his wife and went straight for him. And it killed him. The wife survived to tell the story of what her husband had done. He had tried to deck the shark. I told my friends: That’s what a wonderful man is, a man who will try to deck the shark.

I don’t know what the guy did for a living, but he had a very old-fashioned sense of what it is to be a man, and I think that sense is coming back into style because of who saved us on Sept. 11, and that is very good for our country.

Why? Well, manliness wins wars. Strength and guts plus brains and spirit wins wars. But also, you know what follows manliness? The gentleman. The return of manliness will bring a return of gentlemanliness, for a simple reason: masculine men are almost by definition gentlemen. Example: If you’re a woman and you go to a faculty meeting at an Ivy League University you’ll have to fight with a male intellectual for a chair, but I assure you that if you go to a Knights of Columbus Hall, the men inside (cops, firemen, insurance agents) will rise to offer you a seat. Because they are manly men, and gentlemen.

It is hard to be a man. I am certain of it; to be a man in this world is not easy. I know you are thinking, But it’s not easy to be a woman, and you are so right. But women get to complain and make others feel bad about their plight. Men have to suck it up. Good men suck it up and remain good-natured, constructive and helpful; less-good men become the kind of men who are spoofed on “The Man Show”—babe-watching, dope-smoking nihilists. (Nihilism is not manly, it is the last refuge of sissies.)

*   *   *

I should discuss how manliness and its brother, gentlemanliness, went out of style. I know, because I was there. In fact, I may have done it. I remember exactly when: It was in the mid-’70s, and I was in my mid-20s, and a big, nice, middle-aged man got up from his seat to help me haul a big piece of luggage into the overhead luggage space on a plane. I was a feminist, and knew our rules and rants. “I can do it myself,” I snapped.

It was important that he know women are strong. It was even more important, it turns out, that I know I was a jackass, but I didn’t. I embarrassed a nice man who was attempting to help a lady. I wasn’t lady enough to let him. I bet he never offered to help a lady again. I bet he became an intellectual, or a writer, and not a good man like a fireman or a businessman who says, “Let’s roll.”

But perhaps it wasn’t just me. I was there in America, as a child, when John Wayne was a hero, and a symbol of American manliness. He was strong, and silent. And I was there in America when they killed John Wayne by a thousand cuts. A lot of people killed him—not only feminists but peaceniks, leftists, intellectuals, others. You could even say it was Woody Allen who did it, through laughter and an endearing admission of his own nervousness and fear. He made nervousness and fearfulness the admired style. He made not being able to deck the shark, but doing the funniest commentary on not decking the shark, seem . . . cool.

But when we killed John Wayne, you know who we were left with. We were left with John Wayne’s friendly-antagonist sidekick in the old John Ford movies, Barry Fitzgerald. The small, nervous, gossiping neighborhood commentator Barry Fitzgerald, who wanted to talk about everything and do nothing.

This was not progress. It was not improvement.

I missed John Wayne.

But now I think . . . he’s back. I think he returned on Sept. 11. I think he ran up the stairs, threw the kid over his back like a sack of potatoes, came back down and shoveled rubble. I think he’s in Afghanistan now, saying, with his slow swagger and simmering silence, “Yer in a whole lotta trouble now, Osama-boy.”

I think he’s back in style. And none too soon.

Welcome back, Duke.

And once again: Thank you, men of Sept. 11.

Forgive me. I’m going to return to a story that has been well documented the past few weeks, and I ask your indulgence. So much has been happening, there are so many things to say, and yet my mind will not leave one thing: the firemen, and what they did.

Although their heroism has been widely celebrated, I don’t think we have quite gotten its meaning, or fully apprehended its dimensions. But what they did that day, on Sept. 11—what the firemen who took those stairs and entered those buildings did—was to enter American history, and Western history. They gave us the kind of story you tell your grandchildren about. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it, and I don’t think my city will either.

What they did is not a part of the story but the heart of the story.

*   *   *

Here in my neighborhood in the East 90s many of us now know the names of our firemen and the location of our firehouse. We know how many men we lost (eight). We bring food and gifts and checks and books to the firehouse, we sign big valentines of love, and yet of course none of it is enough or will ever be enough.

Every day our two great tabloids list the memorials and wakes and funeral services. They do reports: Yesterday at a fireman’s funeral they played “Stairway to Heaven.” These were the funerals for yesterday:

Captain Terence Hatton, of Rescue 1—the elite unit that was among the first at the Towers—at 10 a.m. at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue.

Lt Timothy Higgins of Special Operations at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church, on Portion Road in Lake Ronkonkoma, out in Long Island.

Firefighter Ruben Correa of Engine 74 at Holy Trinity Catholic Church on West 82nd Street, in Manhattan.

Firefighter Douglas Miller of Rescue 5, at St Joseph’s Church on Avenue F in Matamoras, Pa.

Firefighter Mark Whitford of Engine 23, at St Mary’s Church on Goshen Avenue in Washingtonville, N.Y.

Firefighter Neil Leavy of Engine 217 at Our Lady Queen of Peace, on New Dorp Lane in Staten Island.

Firefigher John Heffernan of Ladder 11 at Saint Camillus Church in Rockaway, Queens.

And every day our tabloids run wallet-size pictures of the firemen, with little capsule bios. Firefighter Stephen Siller of Squad 1, for instance, is survived by wife, Sarah, daughters Katherine, Olivia and Genevieve and sons Jake and Stephen, and by brothers Russell, George and Frank, and sisters Mary, Janice and Virginia.

What the papers are doing—showing you that the fireman had a name and the name had a face and the face had a life—is good. But it of course it is not enough, it can never be enough.

*   *   *

We all of course know the central fact: There were two big buildings and there were 5,000-plus people and it was 8:48 in the morning on a brilliant blue day. And then 45 minutes later the people and the buildings were gone. They just went away. As I write this almost three weeks later, I actually think: That couldn’t be true. But it’s true. That is pretty much where New Yorkers are in the grieving process: “That couldn’t be true. It’s true.” Five thousand dead! “That couldn’t be true. It’s true.” And more than 300 firemen dead.

Three hundred firemen. This is the part that reorders your mind when you think of it. For most of the 5,000 dead were there—they just happened to be there, in the buildings, at their desks or selling coffee or returning e-mail. But the 300 didn’t happen to be there, they went there. In the now-famous phrase, they ran into the burning building and not out of the burning building. They ran up the stairs, not down, they went into it and not out of it. They didn’t flee, they charged. It was just before 9 a.m. and the shift was changing, but the outgoing shift raced to the towers and the incoming shift raced with them. That’s one reason so many were there so quickly, and the losses were so heavy. Because no one went home. They all came.

And one after another they slapped on their gear and ran up the stairs. They did this to save lives. Of all the numbers we’ve learned since Sept. 11, we don’t know and will probably never know how many people that day were saved from the flames and collapse. But the number that has been bandied about is 20,000—20,000 who lived because they thought quickly or were lucky or prayed hard or met up with (were carried by, comforted by, dragged by) a fireman.

I say fireman and not “firefighter.” We’re all supposed to say firefighter, but they were all men, great men, and fireman is a good word. Firemen put out fires and save people, they take people who can’t walk and sling them over their shoulders like a sack of potatoes and take them to safety. That’s what they do for a living. You think to yourself: Do we pay them enough? You realize: We couldn’t possibly pay them enough. And in any case a career like that is not about money.

*   *   *

I’m still not getting to the thing I want to say.

It’s that what the New York Fire Department did—what those men did on that brilliant blue day in September—was like D-Day. It was daring and brilliant and brave, and the fact of it—the fact that they did it, charging into harm’s way—changed the world we live in. They brought love into a story about hate—for only love will make you enter fire. Talk about your Greatest Generation—the greatest generation is the greatest pieces of any generation, and right now that is: them.

So it was like D-Day, but it was also like the charge of the Light Brigade. Into the tower of death strode the three hundred. And though we continue to need reporters to tell us all the facts, to find out the stories of what the firemen did in those towers, and though reporters have done a wonderful, profoundly appreciative job of that, what we need most now is different.

We need a poet. We need a writer of ballads and song to capture what happened there as the big men in big black rubber coats and big boots and hard peaked hats lugged 50 and 100 pounds of gear up into the horror and heat, charging upward, going up so sure, calm and fast—so humorously, some of them, cracking mild jokes—that some of the people on the stairwell next to them, going down, trying to escape, couldn’t help but stop and turn and say, “Thank you,” and “Be careful, son,” and some of them took pictures. I have one. On the day after the horror, when the first photos of what happened inside the towers were posted on the Internet, I went to them. And one was so eloquent—a black-and-white picture that was almost a blur: a big, black-clad back heading upward in the dark, and on his back, in shaky double-vision letters because the person taking the picture was shaking, it said “Byrne.”

Just Byrne. But it suggested to me a world. An Irish kid from Brooklyn, where a lot of the Byrnes settled when they arrived in America. Now he lives maybe on Long Island, in Massapequa or Huntington. Maybe third-generation American, maybe in his 30s, grew up in the ‘70s when America was getting crazy, but became what his father might have been, maybe was: a fireman. I printed copies of the picture, and my brother found the fireman’s face and first name in the paper. His name was Patrick Byrne. He was among the missing. Patrick Byrne was my grandfather’s name, and is my cousin’s name. I showed it to my son and said, “Never forget this—ever.”

*   *   *

The Light Brigade had Tennyson. It was the middle of the Crimean War and the best of the British light cavalry charged on open terrain in the Battle of Balaclava. Of the 600 men who went in, almost half were killed or wounded, and when England’s poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, learned of it, he turned it into one of the most famous poems of a day when poems were famous:

Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
     Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
      Volley’d and thunder’d:
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
     Rode the six hundred.

I don’t think young people are taught that poem anymore; it’s martial and patriarchal, and even if it weren’t it’s cornball. But then, if a Hollywood screenwriter five weeks ago wrote a story in which buildings came down and 300 firemen sacrificed their lives to save others, the men at the studios would say: Nah, too cornball. That couldn’t be true. But it’s true.

Brave men do brave things. After Sept. 11 a friend of mine said something that startled me with its simple truth. He said, “Everyone died as the person they were.” I shook my head. He said, “Everyone died who they were. A guy who ran down quicker than everyone and didn’t help anyone—that was him. The guy who ran to get the old lady and was hit by debris—that’s who he was. They all died who they were.”

*   *   *

Who were the firemen? The Christian scholar and author Os Guinness said the other night in Manhattan that horror and tragedy crack open the human heart and force the beauty out. It is in terrible times that people with great goodness inside become most themselves. “The real mystery,” he added, “is not the mystery of evil but the mystery of goodness.” Maybe it’s because of that mystery that firemen themselves usually can’t tell you why they do what they do. “It’s the job,” they say, and it is, and it is more than that.

So: The firemen were rough repositories of grace. They were the goodness that comes out when society is cracked open. They were responsible. They took responsibility under conditions of chaos. They did their job under heavy fire, stood their ground, claimed new ground, moved forward like soldiers against the enemy. They charged.

There is another great poet and another great charge, Pickett’s charge, at Gettysburg. The poet, playwright and historian Stephen Vincent Benet wrote of Pickett and his men in his great poetic epic of the Civil War, “John Brown’s Body”:

There was a death-torn mile of broken ground to cross,
And a low stone wall at the end, and behind it the Second Corps,
And behind that force another, fresh men who had not fought.
They started to cross that ground. The guns began to tear them.

From the hills they say that it seemed more like a sea than a wave,
A sea continually torn by stones flung out of the sky,
And yet, as it came, still closing, closing, and rolling on,
As the moving sea closes over the flaws and rips of the tide.

But the men would not stop:

You could mark the path that they took by the dead that they left behind, . . .
And yet they came on unceasing, the fifteen thousand no more,
And the blue Virginia flag did not fall, did not fall, did not fall.

The center line held to the end, he wrote, and didn’t break until it wasn’t there anymore.

The firemen were like that. And like the soldiers of old, from Pickett’s men through D-Day, they gave us a moment in history that has left us speechless with gratitude and amazement, and maybe relief, too. We still make men like that. We’re still making their kind. Then that must be who we are.

We are entering an epic struggle, and the firemen gave us a great gift when they gave us this knowledge that day. They changed a great deal by being who they were.

They deserve a poet, and a poem. At the very least a monument. I enjoy the talk about building it bigger, higher, better and maybe we’ll do that. But I’m one of those who thinks: Make it a memory. The pieces of the towers that are left, that still stand, look like pieces of a cathedral. Keep some of it. Make it part of a memorial. And at the center of it—not a part of it but at the heart of it—bronze statues of firemen looking up with awe and resolution at what they faced. And have them grabbing their helmets and gear as if they were running toward it, as if they are running in.

God is back. He’s bursting out all over. It’s a beautiful thing to see.

Random data to support the assertion:

In the past 17 days, since the big terrible thing, our country has, unconsciously but quite clearly, chosen a new national anthem. It is “God Bless America,” the song everyone sang in the days after the blasts to show they loved their country. It’s what they sang on television, it’s what kids sang in school, it’s what families sang in New York at 7 p.m. the Friday after the atrocity when we all went outside with our candles and stood together in little groups in front of big apartment buildings. A friend of mine told me you could hear it on Park Avenue from uptown to downtown, the soft choruses wafting from block to block.

You know why I think everyone went to Irving Berlin’s old song, without really thinking, as their anthem for our country? Because of the first word.

*   *   *

I find myself thinking in mystical terms of President Bush’s speech to Congress and the country, and I know from conversations with many people that I am not alone.

It seemed to me a God-touched moment and a God-touched speech, by which I mean, in part, that little miracles surrounded it. A president and staff who had no time to produce something fine and lasting, produced it. A president who at his strongest moments had betrayed a certain “I’m kinda surprised to be here” vibration had metamorphosed into a gentleman of cool command—the kind of command you sense in a man who understands he ought to be there, should be leading, can trust his own judgment and rely on you to respect it. A great but wounded country heard exactly what it needed to pick itself up, dust itself off and start all over again.

Mr. Bush had a new weight, a new gravity, a new physical and moral comfort. You could see it. A man who had never been able to read from a TelePrompTer before used the TelePrompTer like a seasoned pro, which is to say like a man who didn’t need one.

Mr. Bush found his voice, just at the moment when people tend to lose theirs. He didn’t rely on bromides or high flights or boilerplate; he gave it to you plain and hard with the common words of a common man. He said, “We will not tire, we will not falter, we will not fail.” He said, “They will hand over the terrorists or they will share in their fate.” He said, “These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion.”

He talked just like George W. Bush.

He found himself amid the rubble.

He talked of prayer like a man who’d been praying, and who understood that tens of millions of Americans and others throughout the world were his powerful prayer warriors. They prayed the right thing would be said and done. It was. And now we feel we have what we needed, hoped we’d have, weren’t sure we had: A true commander in chief.

All of this is quite wonderful, a tribute to President Bush and the men and women who work so hard for him. But he, and they, could not have produced that great night alone, and he, and they, would be the first to say it.

*   *   *

In the early days after the blast, I visited several of the memorials that have sprung up around town, in Union Square and in the heart of Greenwich Village. I was struck, at first, by the all the religious imagery, especially traditionally Catholic imagery—mass cards, pictures of the Sacred Heart, little statues of St. Anthony and St. Francis, pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe, votive candles, prayers written on envelopes and pieces of paper grabbed from a desk.

Then I realized there was so much because so many of the firemen and policemen who died were Catholic—Italian and Irish and Puerto Rican men from Queens and Staten Island, from Jersey and Brooklyn. It was their families and friends who had brought the mass cards and the statues of St. Anthony, by tradition the patron saint of missing things, in those early days, when they were still hoping that someone they loved would emerge from the ruins.

*   *   *

On Sunday I watched Oprah Winfrey at the wonderful Spirit of New York special at Yankee stadium. She prayed aloud—a lot of people prayed aloud—and Bette Midler made everyone feel better just by singing.

That morning I had gone to our local mosque, the biggest in Manhattan, on East 96th Street to show sympathy and regard for people who might be feeling frightened and defensive. I watched as men prayed on their knees facing Mecca.

Then a friend came over and we talked about the speech she was going to make at a memorial for a friend of hers who’d died at Cantor Fitzgerald. He was a friend from her Alcoholics Anonymous group. I asked her what she wanted to say, and she said she wanted to tell the rest of the group that the friend they’d lost had always arrived everywhere early. He was early at AA meetings, and he used to greet the newcomers at the back.

On Sept. 11 he was early at work. After that he probably got early to heaven, where he was probably greeted himself—by Bill W., the great man who was one of the founders of AA. She wanted everyone to know that their friend and Bill W probably had a great conversation about how meetings are held these days, and about the importance of having greeters in the back for new arrivals and first-timers.

I wasn’t surprised by what she said, not only because I know her faith but because some little taboo or self-editing or reticence has lifted in the past few weeks. People are feeling a little less self-conscious about integrating their actual thoughts about their faith into the actual statements they make to friends and family, to coworkers and colleagues.

That’s a great thing. In my little town that’s a kind of miracle too.

I was thinking the other day: In 1964, Time Magazine famously headlined “God Is Dead.” I hope now, at the very highest reaches of that great magazine, they do a cover that says “God Is Back.”

This, for me, is the unforgettable image of the day: the fine gray ash that covered everything downtown, all the people and buildings and cars; the ash that flew into the air in the explosions and the burning and that settled over half the city. It was just like Pompeii, which also was taken by surprise and also was left covered top to bottom with ash, fine gray ash.

This is what everyone in New York says, sooner or later, when they talk about what happened: “It was such a beautiful day. It was the most beautiful day of the year.” It was. Clear stunning cloudless skies, warm but not hot, a breeze. It was so clear that everyone in town and Jersey and the outer boroughs—everyone could see the huge, thick plumes and clouds of black and gray smoke. Everyone could see what happened.

And when it began, everyone was doing something innocent. It was morning in New York in the fall and workers were getting coffee and parents were taking their children to school.

*   *   *

And yet: For all the horror we are lucky. If you are reading these words you are among the beneficiaries of great good fortune. Those of us who were not in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon or nearby, those of us who were not among the terrified victims on the planes, those were not heroic firemen and tough cops—-on a local TV show last night the reporter Dick Oliver was asked how it was that so many firemen died, couldn’t they have escaped, and he said, with a rough voice that had love in it, “Firemen don’t run out of buildings. Firemen run into buildings”—are blessed indeed.

And not only because we are alive. We are lucky because for some reason—for some reason, and we don’t even know what it was—the terrorists didn’t use a small nuclear weapon floated into New York on a barge in the East River. We are lucky that this didn’t turn nuclear, chemical or biological. It could have, and I thought the next time the bad guys hit it would have. Instead they used more “conventional” weapons, fuel-heavy airliners and suicide bombers. And so the number of dead will be in the thousands or tens of thousands and not millions or tens of millions.

We have been spared. And now, chastened and shaken, we are given another chance, maybe the last chance, to commit ourselves seriously and at some cost to protecting our country.

*   *   *

People were saying “This is like Pearl Harbor,” but it wasn’t Pearl Harbor. Our fleet wasn’t taken out; we weren’t attacked by a nation whose planes had clear markings; we lost 10,000 or 20,000 people, and they were civilians. If it has to be a movie, yesterday really to most of us in New York was “Titanic.” It was the end of a world, the drowning of illusions as brave men and women held hands and jumped; it was, I hope, the end of the assumptions that ease and plenty will continue forever, that we rich and powerful folk will be kept safe by our status, wealth and luck; it was the end of a culture of indifference to our nation’s safety. Those Twin Towers, those hard and steely symbols of the towering city: they were the ship that God himself couldn’t sink.

*   *   *

I was, like most of New York, very afraid. My sense from the beginning was: This isn’t going to be over for a while. My son, 14, had just begun at a new high school in Brooklyn, just a stone’s throw across the river from the World Trade Center. He’d left for the subway at 7:30. At 8:45 as I watched TV I saw the first explosion, and the breathtaking telephone report of a terrified man who had seen, he said, a big plane fly straight into one of the towers. “Oh my God,” he said over and over, and it was like hearing the first report of the Hindenburg. I was still watching when something—I thought it was a helicopter—hit the second tower and it blew. And then minutes later the Pentagon.

Phones went down. I could not reach my son or his school. He’s new there—no friends yet, no teachers he felt close to. And Manhattan was cordoned off; no one could get in. Should I go, try to walk to Brooklyn, try to get across the bridge? But what if he calls? If I don’t answer he’ll think I was hurt.

But the Internet did not go down, and I was comforted by instant messages from friends reporting in, e-mails from friends with information—the phones were down but the Net stayed up, and I kept it on all day. I thought a network or newspaper would be hit—the bad guys had targeted the great symbols of American power, the wealth of Wall Street, the military might of Washington. Now I thought: They will hit their much hated media. I sent an e to a friend at a newsmagazine: You guys may get hit, go home. I e’d word to my praying friends: Pray for the children at my son’s school. They e’d back: Pray for my aunt at her school.

*   *   *

I waited by the phone, by the computer, hoping for word. The phone would ring and go dead, or I’d pick it up and get a busy signal.

I ran out, got cash at the bank, walked to 92nd Street and saw, with awe, that the clouds of smoke were visible all the way up here, five miles away. Trucks unloading food at restaurants and grocery stores were double- and triple-parked, their cab doors open, radios blaring. The Church of the Heavenly Rest, an Episcopal church in the neighborhood, immediately taped flyers to utility poles: “On this tragic day, come and pray.”

Three hours later, at noon, my son got through. They had heard the explosions; the head of the high school had come in and said, “Please, peacefully, follow me downstairs.” Most everyone was calm and purposeful; they gathered downstairs and listened to a radio. My son had a long line of kids behind him wanting to call home and he couldn’t speak long. “I’m safe,” he said. “We’re all completely safe.”

I told him the attacks seemed over—he covered the phone and yelled to the line, “My mother says the attacks seem to be over.” I said it had all ended, he said, “She says it has ended.” In times of crisis every American becomes an anchorman.

He told me with the offhand gallantry of a 14-year-old boy, “It looks like I’ll be sleeping in Brooklyn tonight.” The school took him and all the children who couldn’t get home in, cared for them and sent them to the homes of teachers who lived nearby. My son was with a gaggle of boys at the French teacher’s house. He had seen people sobbing on the subway in Brooklyn.

*   *   *

I walked over toward church after noon, and now the scene was silent and jarring. The sidewalks and gutters were jammed with an army of expressionless marchers going from downtown to uptown, silently trudging through the traffic-less city.

Midday mass was pretty full, and people seemed stricken. I saw a neighbor I’d been trying to reach. We’re all fine, she said.

“Did a rat stand on its hind legs this morning?” I asked.

“No, and if it had, I would have run to your house to tell you.”

Like so many in New York, she has feared a catastrophic terrorist event for years, the type from which you have to flee, quickly. Years ago she told me that she saw a rat in her neighborhood, and he had risen on his haunches and then scrambled away. For no reason she could remember, she said a prayer at that moment: “Dear Lord, if the big terrible thing is ever coming, will you warn me by having a rat rise like that?” She often prays this. I was very glad she had not seen the rat.

*   *   *

I walked by a local schoolyard. On the steps, a group of young tough kids who are often there playing a boom box. They have the look, the manner, of danger, and everyone says drugs are sold there. Yesterday they were on the steps, boom box blaring, only this time it was news reports telling us what was happening. The well-suited men and women marching by would stop and listen to the news, and then nod with thanks and leave. I listened for 10 minutes and when I left I said “Thank you, gentlemen,” and they smiled and said “Welcome.” They were offering a public service.

In the afternoon I went to the home of a friend in midtown—again stunning silence, and the streets now empty of people and traffic. On the way home, in the early evening, I went to get on a bus, and as I went to put my fare card in, the driver said softly, “Free rides today.”

The bus was jammed, and people had what Tom Wolfe calls “information compulsion”: Everyone was talking about where they’d been, what they’d seen, “I was in the Trade Center at 8:00 a.m. and left 15 minutes later.”

A funny moment: A seat opened up and we disagreed over who should get it. “Oh I don’t need it.” “No, I’m getting off in a minute.” The courtesy made us all laugh. An elderly Englishwoman in a seat chatted with a young girl standing nearby. As the young girl left, she turned and said, “I’m so sorry you’re seeing the city like this.” The Englishwoman shook her head and put out her hands as if to say: No, I am seeing the best.

*   *   *

As I watched television I became aware, as everyone I’ve spoken to has mentioned along the way, that the great leaders in our time of trauma were the reporters and anchors and producers of the networks and news stations. What cool and fabulous work from Peter Jennings, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw, what stunning work from Brit Hume and Aaron Brown, Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer, and the cameramen who took stupendous and dangerous pictures, and the guests like Richard Holbrooke and Norman Schwarzkopf and Tom Clancy, who added knowledge and context and well-grounded viewpoints. They all did that knowing it was dangerous where they were, knowing it could get worse, that the weapons or targets could change. They stood their ground and did their jobs.

Those anchors and reporters, they led us Tuesday, with cool and warmth, with intelligence and deep professionalism. And every one of them must have known he, or she, was one way or another in harm’s way. These men and women of the media should all get a mass Medal of Freedom the next time it’s given. They really helped our country.

*   *   *

The night of the attack my son got through to me again, and he told me more of what he’d seen and then he told me, just before he rang off, of the amazing thing he’d seen. At dusk, as the sun was going down over the city, he looked over at Manhattan. The rays of the sun hit the smoke and debris floating in the air, hit it strong and at an angle, and it all reflected on the water of the river and the light it produced was beautiful. “It looked golden,” he said. “It was all the color of gold.”

Even in horror there is beauty to be seen, even in trauma there is strength to be gained, and at the heart of every defeat is the seed of a future victory. After the Titanic sank, they reformed international maritime law, mandating enough lifeboats for passengers and constant radio contact.

And that is what we must do now, that is where the golden lining can be: We must admit that we have ignored the obvious, face the terrible things that can happen, decide to protect ourselves with everything from an enhanced intelligence system to a broad and sturdy civil-defense system, with every kind of defense that can be imagined by man, from vaccines to a missile defense.

For the next time, and there will of course be a next time, the attack likely won’t be “conventional.”

Sometimes bad luck is good luck. A few weeks ago, I’d had an appointment to interview President Bush for a book on Ronald Reagan. It was canceled due to Mr. Bush’s upcoming trip to Europe, then rescheduled, and when I walked into the Oval Office last week I found a president in a talkative mood.

Europe was on his mind. His thoughts were on his meetings with European Union leaders and with Russian President Vladimir Putin, from which he had returned three days before. As the official purpose of the interview had not been to discuss Mr. Bush’s trip, I asked officials at the White House afterward whether his comments on the trip could be used for publication in an article for The Wall Street Journal. They approved.

I had not seen Mr. Bush since late last summer, and he seemed to me changed. His hair is already grayer after five months in office, and as he grows older he looks to me more like his father, in the angles of his face and the way he moves it. Gone is the tentativeness of 20 months ago, of the lost man of the early Republican debates. In its place seems an even-keeled confidence, even a robust faith in his own perceptions and judgments.

He was tanned, and is clearly still exercising. He wore a blue pin-striped suit, white shirt and blue tie, sat in the chair he uses for photo-ops when dignitaries visit, and surveyed the bright room before him.

The president referred several times to the mystique of the presidency, and pointed with a grin to a side door. That’s where people wait outside and figure out how to tell me off, he said. Then, he said, they come in, see the Oval Office, meet the president and say, It’s great to be here, great to see you!

His Oval Office is bright, determinedly so, no high formality, no deep blues. But no one, he says, can enter without a tie, and though we talk for 35 minutes he never unbuttons or removes his jacket.

The president noted the carved American eagle on the front of his antique desk, the one used by Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. The head of the eagle, he notes, is turned toward the arrows it holds in its talon. But look here, he says, at the American eagle in the presidential seal on the rug: The head is turned away from the arrows and toward the olive branches he holds in his other talon. “Harry Truman changed it,” he says. “He wanted America looking toward peace.”

Then he talked Europe, and you could hear the sound of the Bush foreign policy at work, or rather the thinking that determines that policy at its most expansive.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush came away from Europe with a deep feeling of satisfaction at how he’d done and who he’d been. He returned hopeful and determined, with what seemed a heightened sense that history is not just something that happens to the world but is something that human beings produce.

He knew the reigning media cliché going in was Will Bumpkin Boy Embarrass Us? But he wasn’t concerned about that. He enjoys being underestimated and likes the columns that begin “Once again Bush was underestimated.”

But Mr. Bush feels the real story of the summit is that he stood his ground with Europe and began a new relationship with Mr. Putin.

“I didn’t think about Ronald Reagan when I was there, but now that you bring it up. . . . With all due modesty, I think Ronald Reagan would have been proud of how I conducted myself. I went to Europe a humble leader of a great country, and stood my ground. I wasn’t going to yield. I listened, but I made my point.

“And I went to dinner, as Karen [Hughes, who sat in on the interview] would tell you, with 15 leaders of the EU, and patiently sat there as all 15 in one form or another told me how wrong I was” about the Kyoto accords. “And at the end I said, ‘I appreciate your point of view, but this is the American position because it’s right for America.’ ” Mr. Bush said the issue of a missile defense was similar to global warming, though to a certain degree there was “a different attitude” among the EU leaders; they were “a little more forward leaning” on it.

“My point is that I was holding my ground on issues I think are important for our country. And I believe in missile defense in particular, that as a result of standing my ground based on principle, not based on hostility but based upon a positive point of view, that I’ll be able to reach an accord with Putin.”

I asked Mr. Bush if there is anything he’d like to ask Mr. Reagan. He said he’d like to talk to the former president about his meeting with Mr. Putin.

“How was it with Putin?” I asked.

“It was a big moment,” said Mr. Bush. “I found a man who realizes his future lies with the West, not the East, that we share common security concerns, primarily Islamic fundamentalism, that he understands missiles could affect him just as much as us. On the other hand he doesn’t want to be diminished by America.”

Mr. Bush said he is seeking to encourage a relationship with Mr. Putin, and that this hope was reflected in his public comments.

“I just didn’t complete the Reagan sentence,” he said. “Reagan said, ‘Trust and verify.’ My attitude was, I said ‘Trust.’ Sophisticates surely understand that once you lie, you know, that trust isn’t forever, trust is something you must earn. But when I looked at him I felt like he was shooting straight with me.” I asked the president if he would attempt to keep up a personal relationship with Mr. Putin.

He said, “I will. That’s why I’m going to invite him to my ranch.”

He spoke sympathetically of the challenges Mr. Putin faces—an “anti-American bureaucracy” that is “a hangover” from the Cold War. He mused that Mr. Putin probably thinks that the American president is dealing with “a bunch of hard-liners here about him, too.” The best way to “welcome him to the West,” and to “encourage him to make the right choices in terms of the rule of law and transparency and defense measures is to break down any barriers that he may have.”

“I told him, I said in a meeting, ‘You know, if you look at me and think I’m trying to pull one over on you and trying to weaken Russia, then we don’t have much to talk about. We can go through the diplomatic niceties.’ I said, ‘Mr. Putin, you’ve got to figure—you’ve got to look at me and decide whether I am hostile or not hostile, whether or not I want to diminish Russia or whether I want Russia as a friend and ally with whom we can trade and keep the peace. And . . . if you think negative, then this is going to be an interesting conversation for us but short-lived, and we’ll go out and play like we had a good conversation.’ And he thought that was interesting.”

Mr. Putin spoke at some length about Russian history, and seemed intent on making the case that Russia had sacrificed a great deal in the transition to democracy. Mr. Bush listened and did not argue, although at one point, he said, he felt like saying, “Wait a minute, you didn’t give up anything. The people actually demanded freedom and you didn’t have any choice.” But Mr. Putin, he said, viewed the great changes of the past decade as a matter of giving things up, and referred often to his country’s debt.

The president listened, and noted Mr. Putin’s interest in history. Mr. Putin said, “Yes, I love history.”

Mr. Bush: “I said, ‘You know, it’s interesting, I do too, I like history a lot.’ ”

*   *   *

“I said,” Mr. Bush continued, “ ’You know, sometimes when you study history you get stuck in the past.’ I said, ‘President Putin, you and I have a chance to make history. The reason one should love history is to determine how to make good history. And this meeting could be the beginning of making some fabulous history. We’re young. Why do you want to stay stuck? This isn’t the Nixon-Brezhnev conversations! Why do you want to stay stuck in that kind of attitude?’ ”

Mr. Putin, he said, seemed taken aback. “I said, ‘Why aren’t we thinking about how to fashion something different [so that when historians think] about the Bush-Putin meeting and the Bush-Putin relationship they think about positive things? It’s negative to think about blowing each other up. That’s not a positive thought. That’s a Cold War thought. That’s a thought when people were enemies with each other.’ ”

He said Mr. Putin seemed to like what he heard.

The president spoke sympathetically of the challenge Mr. Putin faced during their joint press conference. Mr. Bush noted that observers had thought Mr. Putin seemed somewhat unsure at their meeting with the press. Well, Mr. Bush said, it was the biggest press conference Mr. Putin had ever had. Mr. Putin, he noted, is 43 years old, and in some ways unused to the demands of the world stage. “For me I was used to it but . . . here’s a guy who walks out, and now he’s in the—this is the big leagues, this is the brightest klieg light of all. And it was a big press conference, there were a lot of people, and he didn’t know what to expect. I knew what to expect, I knew there were going to be essentially softball questions by those reporters.”

I said to President Bush, “What you’re telling me is this meeting with Putin was a kind of breakthrough, it was something special.” “I think it was,” said Mr. Bush.

Referring again to his hopes for a missile-defense agreement, the president said there was work to do. He told Mr. Putin he feared that diplomats would talk things into the ground. He asked if Mr. Putin would agree to a one-on-one negotiating dialogue between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Putin intimate Sergei Ivanov. Mr. Putin agreed without hesitation. Mr. Bush was encouraged. This way, he said, bureaucracies will not “jabber it to death.”

It seemed to me as I left the White House that one might infer—and perhaps should infer—from the president’s comments that he will not attempt to tear the ABM treaty up, but instead will move for an amendment that would allow further missile testing.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush noted he has gotten some flak for saying he trusted Mr. Putin. “I’ve been noticing some of these guys popping off saying Bush shouldn’t have used the word ‘trust.’ If you’re trying to redefine a relationship, and somebody asks you, ‘Can you trust the guy?’ imagine what it’d have been like if I’d have stood up in front of the world and said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ Or, ‘You know, perhaps.’ Or, ‘It’s yet to be proven.’ To me my attitude is, and this is Reaganesque in a sense, ‘Yes I trust him, until he proves otherwise.’ But why say the ‘proves otherwise’? To me that goes without saying.”

He said he is aware that when he talks to Mr. Putin he is talking to a man who is not happy that “the Soviet Union is no longer the Soviet Union,” and that Russian leaders now are “stuck” with a reality in which they have “the Soviet Union’s debt” but not its “asset base.” He said he understood Mr. Putin’s frustration.

In this part of our talk, the president reminded me again of his father, whose temperament and talents were well suited to diplomacy, and who made an effort to understand the forces that pulled and pushed allies and adversaries. This part of his nature helped him build the most successful international coalition of our time in the Gulf War. But it also led him to say essentially nothing the day the Berlin Wall came down. He had sympathy for how the Soviet leaders felt, and didn’t want to “gloat.” And so the end of an epic struggle in human history went unremarked by the victor. Empathy can be a double-edged sword.

The president said that Mr. Putin seems to want a relationship with the United States. Mr. Bush told Mr. Putin that in the long run his greatest likely challenge is from China, not America. “I said, ‘You’re European. Mr. President, you have no enemies in NATO; NATO has been good for you, not bad. NATO doesn’t create any problems for you.’“ On the issue of NATO enlargement, of including Russia in the alliance, Mr. Bush said it would be “interesting,” that part of him thought, “Why not?” though “I haven’t thought about the nuance of it.”

*   *   *

After I left the Oval Office, I talked to Karen Hughes, who told me that when Presidents Putin and Bush were walking in the gardens after their meeting they chatted by themselves, without translators. Mr. Putin is taking English lessons for one hour each day, and wanted to talk to Mr. Bush on his own. Mr. Putin told the president, “I see you named your daughters after your mother and your mother-in-law.” Mr. Bush smiled and said, “Aren’t I a good diplomat?” Mr. Putin laughed and said, “I did the same thing!”

As is fitting for a soft June afternoon with bright sun and a mild breeze, I have no thoughts today, only bits and pieces of thoughts. I continue to work on a book and find myself happy, tired and thinking about things that happened long ago when the world even then was not young. Also this has been a big week in my home, with my son having a birthday on Monday, being confirmed in the Catholic Church on Tuesday and taking part in closing exercises at school on Wednesday.

However (she said not at all defensively), it is not true that I have nothing to say. It is only true that I have nothing important to say. So go read Mickey Kaus or check Drudge or Romenesko’s MediaNews, or cruise the papers or jump around this splendid site. All I’m going to do is something that a part of me has always wanted to do, and that is a gossip column with boldface names. Only the boldface names don’t belong to the celebrated and famous. But they are very important in my neck of the woods, as we say on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

*   *   *

St Thomas More Church in Manhattan rocked Tuesday night with the strains of a small, well-trained choir singing into adulthood the eighth graders of the Narnia Class of 2001. Standing to the right of a statue of St Joseph, in which the earthly father of Jesus bears a striking resemblance to Douglas Fairbanks Jr., were the confirmation candidates: Robert von Althann, Philippe Arman, Timothy Barr, John Mason Coyne, Christine Culver, Michaela Culver, Henry Delouvrier, James Fouhey, John Gerard, Nicola Johnson, Christopher Latos, Skye Lehman, Nicholas Manice, Gregory Marino, Diana Mellon, Christopher Mixon, Evan O’Brien, Patrick Fionnbharr O’Halloran, Gregory Pasternack, Matt Petrillo, Rudi Pica, Will Rahn, Brett Rehfeld, Jimmy Reinicke, Evan Richards, Lily Salembier, Alexandra Schueler, Chris Skrela, Katrina Sullivan and Giulia Theodoli.

They were confirmed in a ceremony that not only started on time it ended early because Bishop Patrick Sheridan likes both people and homilies to move at a brisk pace. Also there was a beautiful young woman named Jennifer who was confirmed with the kids and who walked proudly with them and didn’t make them feel she was any different. She did her part with great style.

When you are confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church, you take as your own the name of a saint whose life you find moving or inspiring. (Some take this very formally and internalize it; Bobby Kennedy signed his name Robert Francis Xavier Kennedy into early adulthood.) So many of the candidates this year chose unusual names—Clement, Blaise, Augustine, Siobahn, Alejandro. One of the girls took St. Michael the Archangel.

Will Rahn, son of a certain Wall Street Journal columnist, read the intentions during mass—“for the poor of the world, that they might find sustenance”—and Matt Petrillo did a Bible reading. The boys were so tall and dignified in their red graduation-style gowns—14-year-old boys are now often six feet tall—and they repeated with deep voices the words, the prayer actually, said at baptism but voiced at that time for the baby being baptized by his godparents. But Tuesday night they made the vows on their own, with their own voices.

“Do you renounce Satan and all his works?” they were asked.

“I do,” they answered.

I wondered if those in the pews were struck by the starkness of those grave words, and I wondered too how many were thinking: This is like the end of “The Godfather,” when Michael Corleone stands for Connie’s baby at the Baptism while his enemies are rubbed out. Francis Ford Coppola made great artistic use of the extraordinary dialogue of Baptism but may have damaged the ceremony for an entire generation (no, for two) that would be relieved not to be thinking about gangster movies while taking part in the sacraments.

JoMarie Pica, mother of three and wife of Vin, had taught many of the boys in Christian doctrine classes and had readied them for confirmation. Three hours before the ceremony she was in an accident and the front of her SUV was smashed up. She went to the preconfirmation buffet at Natika and Victor von Althann’s anyway, threw back two Advils and a glass of wine and walked into the church with the candidates holding her candle high.

I taught a small class of girls and got to walk in holding a candle too. The writer Sim Johnston, who also lives in the neighborhood and also teaches one of the Christian doctrine classes, was there helping out the boys too. My girls were beautiful and a little nervous, and a few of their sponsors were late—you have to have an adult Catholic who stands up with you, and for you, when you’re confirmed—and Lily worried that her sponsor might not make it. I said don’t worry, I’ll stand in for her if she doesn’t make it. And then I was so relieved for Lily and half-disappointed for myself when her sponsor came to the altar with Lily and stood with her right hand on her shoulder as the bishop made the sign of the cross with holy oil on Lily’s forehead.

Before the ceremony began the bishop stood with us in a little side room. He looked dignified and weighty, holding a tall staff shaped like a shepherd’s crook and wearing a miter, the big pointy hat, or rather the liturgical headdress, that bishops and cardinals sometimes wear. He was in bright red robes. He had thick eyeglasses and gray hair and was in his 70s and as the girls and the boys chirped and shoved and laughed he took a hard look at them and said “Quiet!” in a way that made me mildly ashamed of my inability to whip them into shape. They listened to him for at least eight seconds before becoming themselves again.

*   *   *

I love some of these children. Some of them have been my son’s friends and in my house since preschool—and I want to hug them when I see them. Some are so kindhearted that they bring tears to your eyes. Some of them are deep inside good and mean to do good in the world. A handful of them are brave, too, and have had a lot to put up with in their parents.

But some of them are victims of the self-esteem movement. They have a wholly unearned self-respect. No, an unearned admiration for themselves. And they’ve been given this high sense of themselves by parents and teachers who didn’t and don’t have time for them, and who make it up to them by making them conceited. I’m not sure how this will play out as they hit adulthood. What will happen to them when the world stops telling them what they have been told every day for the first quarter century of their lives, which is: You are wonderful.

Maybe it will make for a supergeneration of strong and confident young adults who think outside the box (apologies to Pete du Pont) and proceed through their lives with serenity and sureness. Maybe life will hit them upside the head when they’re 24 and they get fired from their first job and suddenly they’re destabilized by the shock of not being admired. Maybe it will send them reeling.

I always want to tell them: the only kind of self-respect that lasts is the kind you earn by honestly coming through and achieving. That’s the only way you’ll make a lasting good impression on yourself.

*   *   *

One of the best things about Tuesday night was that the church was almost full, and so many families with many generations were there, and it was a pretty night in June and everyone could have been somewhere else, and yet here they were, making their responses during the mass and making them with strong voices, as if they knew what comes next. Which in a mass is not always so easy. But here we all were, and it always seems a surprise to me, the acting out of such old beliefs in the heart of new-millennium Manhattan by sophisticated mommies and daddies and hip grandmas. It was moving. It was as if the Holy Spirit were saying, “It’s all right, there is a future here.”

When it was over, families fanned out into neighborhood restaurants, and we went to an Italian place called Vico, where they had a vanilla cake for my son, who had taken his confirmation name from St. Jude. The cake had a cross and said “Hey Jude,” and when the waiters brought it to him they sang happy birthday.

The restaurant—smallish, white-walled, with doors and windows open to the street—had some long tables with happy families. The Picas were across the room with an assortment of uncles and aunts, and with a handsome young man named Alex Mendik, who recently lost his well-loved father Bernie, and whom everybody hugged with great affection. At our table was young Miles Pope,,also an eighth-grader, a young conservative intellectual who quotes Aristotle in an appropriate and unshowoffy manner, not an easy thing in a young man.

It was just a happy night. It was like the junior high school graduation scene in “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn” except we weren’t in an ice-cream parlor and it cost roughly 200 times what egg creams for everyone cost Francie Nolan’s mother. But the spirit of Mrs. Nolan, who made Francie so proud by knowing that on a night like this you should leave a tip, prevailed, and my son’s father and my former husband, as flawed and messy modern Catholics say, was generous and charming and had a great debate with the boys about the nature of the modern European Union. My son’s godmother, Peggy Byrne, our Aunt Peggy, merrily made faces as the boys talked about continents and kings.

And then it was going on 11 p.m. and we all kissed goodbye and jumped in cabs or walked home. And I thought: I belong to a community. My son belongs to a community. This is it. It’s a neighborhood community, and a community of faith, a school community and a community of old relationships that last forever.

You can forget that you are part of a community. You don’t even notice it, and then one night you look around and realize that you’re in the middle of it. It’s a good feeling to be part of something so big and so important, and to realize that when we celebrate something like a confirmation, we’re celebrating what we belong to and what we’ve just joined.

So I went and told Jude.

It is interesting how American and British political realities have mirrored each other the past few decades, with Britain lagging slightly behind—though only slightly, and not at the beginning.

In the beginning, in 1979, came the revolutionary Margaret Thatcher, there to change all the assumptions of longtime left-wing Britain. She was conservative, tough, antitax, antielite, for small business, a doughty daughter of middle-class live-above-the-shop folk.

A year later her friend Ronald Reagan (who was born over a bank) took power in America and showed himself to be her sort. He had met her in the early ‘70s and told English friends she would be a good prime minister. (“A woman?” a Tory fathead had snorted. Yes, said Mr. Reagan, like Queen Victoria.) To make things even more interesting, the current pope, who came in in 1978, broke all the rules from the start simply by being Polish, and shared Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Reagan’s views on totalitarianism, Soviet communism and religious freedom.

Mr. Reagan left in 1989, replaced by the softer George Bush. Mrs. Thatcher was forced out in 1990, replaced by the more ameliorative John Major. In 1992, after a dozen years of conservative-to-relatively-conservative federal governance, the people of America voted for change.

Enter Bill Clinton, a man of the left who was a reformer of the left and who, having seized the Democratic presidential nomination, moved to seize the restless and prosperous middle of America. To an extent he had a clear philosophy—expressed not by him, but by the intelligent and accomplished Susan Estrich, Michael Dukakis’s campaign manager in 1988, who told me in 1992 that she was tired of losing elections over the death penalty. She would now support those who were for it, such as Mr. Clinton, who made his point by sending a brain-damaged Arkansas man to his death during the campaign. (His name was Rickey Ray Rector, and he famously told his guards minutes before he was taken to the death chamber that he wouldn’t eat his dessert right now, he’d save it for later.)

In 1997 John Major and his Conservatives were upended by Tony Blair, a Third Way man who, like Mr. Clinton, always seemed to be devoting more of his impressive intellectual energy to hiding his views than communicating them. In politics you can walk like a cloud or pierce like a sword; Messrs. Blair and Clinton walk like a cloud, indistinct perhaps but large, and there, and recognizable.

In 1996, at the first chance, the conservative party of America, the Republican Party, fielded an old party war horse against the young Third Wayer. Mr. Clinton, astride a growing economy and relative peace, trounced him.

In 2001, at the first chance, the conservative party of Britain, the Conservative Party, fielded a young party war horse against the young Third Wayer. Mr. Blair, on top of a growing economy and relative peace, trounced him.

It took another try for the Republicans of America to scrape into the presidency, barely, six months ago. Maybe William Hague’s party will succeed after another try, and maybe it’ll just scrape in too.

*   *   *

That the political experiences of America and England have pretty much mirrored each other the past few decades doesn’t mean the British are playing follow-the-leader. They are playing follow-the-trends. All the Western industrial democracies are experiencing variations of the same ones: changing demographics, changing populations, changing cultures, prosperity and its mixed blessings, a lessening of religious feeling.

(A great French novelist of the 19th century once said, feelingly but also as a simple observation, “Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe.” It has been a century since anyone could say that, but somehow it always comes as a surprise that Italy, say, is no longer a Catholic country in habit or culture. It somehow shocked me, though there is no reason it should have, that my first time in Paris, at Christmastime 1993, you could walk miles through streets and neighborhoods and not see a single sign or indication that a great Christian holiday was here. In France, the country of the Curé d’Ars and Bernadette or Lourdes and Joan of Arc.)

And a great challenge for conservatives in all the Western countries is how to show that conservatism is relevant, applicable to the times, reflective of the true nature of the people of the West—and to do so without violating what conservatism is. It is, of course and by its own nature, a way of saying “Stop!” to the aggression and bullying of government, to the encroachment upon the rights of the individual.

But it is fair to say and politically demonstrable that saying “Stop!” is not enough to rouse a populace.

I find that my mind goes back, and has for more than a decade now, to one word: immigration. We live, as we all know, in the great age of immigration, which is transforming America as it is changing Europe. (A small Catholic note: It is ironic and maybe cause for sadness that the church ended the standard Latin mass just as all the Catholics started moving around. The Latin mass might have helped them hold together. Then again, the church made the reform to help people understand what was happening in the mass by telling them in their language. I wonder if any immigrants to America would say that the mass said in English helped them learn the language.)

At any rate, immigrants as we all know have a general personality profile that could be called conservative, and that I would call conservative. That is: They put themselves in charge of their lives, made a big change that took guts, took a chance that showed faith in the future, work hard, are committed to education as a way to rise, care about their community, feel like outsiders, and have often been abused by their own governments, which is part of the reason they left home. They’re often church-, mosque- or synagogue-goers. Unlike affluent natives, they know they need God.

It’s hard to believe the conservatives of Western Europe can’t make something of that, can’t forge bonds that not only broaden their own base but even change the immigrant experience by including them, quickly, in the political life of the nation they’ve joined.

*   *   *

A note about England. Margaret Thatcher, whom I know very slightly and admire greatly, once told me a wonderful thing. She told that the way she saw it, part of England’s purpose, part of its historic mission, had been to stop the bad ideas of Europe from jumping quickly and completely across the Atlantic. The little island to the west of the Continent was the last stopping point for Europe’s unfortunate affection for communism, for full-fledged socialism, and England had slowed them, helped stop them, before they jumped across the Atlantic like a great sneeze and made America and the rest of the West sick.

“It stopped Europe’s bad ideas!” she said.

Mrs. Thatcher is a Tory, and it is clear from her recent speeches that she thinks the modern Labour Party and the cunning and cheery-looking Mr. Blair are in fact aiming to outlaw England: to slowly, subtly take from it its Englishness. You start with the House of Lords, say, or fox hunting, and soon enough you’re on to abolishing the pound and relinquishing autonomous nationhood as you rush to join Europe.

Why would any leader, any great political party, aggressively follow a course that would ultimately lessen its own power? Because it won’t. It will lessen England, but it will raise up those like Mr. Blair and his followers who will go on to lead the new Europe. This is the rise of the Third Way boomers, the liberal intellectual and media establishment. It’s probably the kind of world the folks at AOL Time Warner would like, as they’d have only one big power to make deals with and not a dozen dinky little ones with strange rules and languages. And anyway, the point is: AOL Time Warner folk are culturally and in their politics like Mr. Blair, like Mr. Clinton, like the men and women who would rule the new Europe. They’ll be right at home.

One of the results of a new and fully confederated Europe would be a more homogenized Europe, one in which France is not so French and Germany not so German (yes, this would not be all bad), Greece so Greek, Ireland so Irish. A big Blairite blur of a continent, with the strings of power held in Brussels by bureaucrats whose loyalty is not to a nation or a national idea but to each other. To liberal bureaucratism. To being 50 years old and in power and shaping the new world as it ought to be shaped, which is along the lines you like—modern lines, leftist lines. Big state, big power, big pleasure.

I wonder how the immigrants of Western Europe will feel about finding out that even though they left this country and journeyed to that one they’re still in the old country, only now it’s run in Brussels. I wonder if they’ll like that idea.

I also wonder if, as each separate European country became more homogenized and more like the others, they will start to have very successful local theme parks where you can take the kids to visit your country as it once was. The one in Dublin would have people with big families and dad and mom drinking Guinness and fiery political arguments and pictures of the pope on the wall. I pick Dublin because I was there most recently, and also because I’m Irish-American and I can. The people online waiting to get in will be pleasant daddies with cell phones in their ears and Blackberries clipped to their pockets as they surf around monitoring what’s up with the euro today. (Actually, that’s what it looked like waiting to get into Dublin Castle last summer.) In the Rome Theme Park they’ll have a little Coliseum and a woman who looks like Anna Magnani chasing cats.

*   *   *

I suppose another reason the Blair Labour Party will continue to push to join Europe is that it will be a rejection of the leadership of the United States, a decoupling of Europe’s fate with ours. That’s why they want to start a European army. The never-affectionate-toward America leaders of the coming European confederacy will rule a rich and united force of nations, one that has more power than ever, makes more impact on history than ever. And if the cost of all that is liberty, well, that’s a price they’d pay.

A loss of independence in the judiciary of individual sovereign states, a loss of power for an English government to call the shots in its own economy . . . It seems so counterintuitive. But sometimes history is.